[Stewarton]

The Female Revolutionary Plutarch

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by T. Gillet, for John Murray London: [1805-1806] First Edition Containing Biographical, Historical, and Revolutionary Sketches, Characters, and Anecdotes. By the Author of The Revolutionary Plutarch and Memoirs of Talleyrand. Engraved frontispiece portraits of Josephine Buonaparte, the Queen of France and Princess of Lamballe. Three volumes. 12mo. [197 x 115 x 93 mm]. [3]ff, 437pp; [2]ff, 451pp; [2]ff, 448, [4]pp. Bound in the original blue paper covered boards, the spines with printed paper labels, plain endleaves, uncut edges. (A little rubbed and bumped). The first two volumes were printed by Gillet and are dated 1806, the third was by B. McMillan and is dated 1805. Upper corner of leaf D5 in vol.1 torn, just touching the page number on the verso, short tears at the blank head of a few leaves where opened, and wormhole in the gutter of the opening leaves in vol.3. There are four pages of advertisements at the end of vol.3, the second leaf had been stuck down to the cover, and has been lifted with consequent tears at the blank head and foot. There is a faint contemporary ink signature on p.1 in each volume. A very good copy, as issued in the original boards. This scarce anti-Jacobin work was influential reading for the young Mary Shelley. On returning to London after eloping to the continent with her future husband, Percy Shelley in the autumn of 1814, the seventeen year old Mary Godwin's journal records an intensive reading of memoirs by women and men of the French Revolution. She read this particular work on the 20th and 21st November of that year. These studies culminated with her starting to write a life of the Girondin journalist and novelist Jean Baptiste Louvet de Couvray, whose translated memoirs her father had read and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had helped Joseph Johnson to publish in 1795. Stewarton's works were received enthusiastically by the British press, though little was known about him, other than that he was said to be an old officer. Some catalogues have attributed the works to Lewis Goldmith. "It were much to be wished that these volumes could find their way into every house, and into every cottage in the united kingdoms; the perusal of them would scarcely fail to excite abhorrence of the wretches who now threaten to convert our country into the same scene of desolation, blood, and vice, as they have converted all other countries into, in which their intrigues or their arms have secured them a footing" (Anti-Jacobin Review referring to The Revolutionary Plutarch).

• GBP 900.00 > other currencies
• ordernr.: ebc2880

• bookseller: George Bayntun (GREAT BRITAIN)